Days of Our Off-Season?

Obviously not a lot has happened since my last post, so this will be fairly brief. However, check back for at least two more posts before the 2006 tennis season starts up.

First things first: Davis Cup. I’m sure we all know by now that Croatia beat Slovakia to win the Davis Cup earlier this month. As has been the pattern of late, Ivan Ljubicic played very well during most of the tournament and then blew it in the final. Just to recap what happened:

On Friday, Ljubicic wins the first rubber against Karol Kucera (no surprise); Ancic loses the second rubber against Dominik Hrbaty (no surprise). The Croats win the doubles match on Saturday, making it 2-1 for the Croatians (in case you can’t count). But Ljubicic wakes up on Sunday morning with a sore neck, or so the story goes. He takes some pain medication (better be careful about that—-ask Mariano Puerta), which may have solved his neck problem but makes him throw up between sets during his match (thanks for not doing it on court, ala Sampras or Murray). Ljubicic ends up losing his match in five sets to Dominik Hrbaty, wrecking his chances at tying John McEnroe’s perfect Davis Cup season and putting all the pressure squarely on his teammate Mario Ancic, world-renowned choker. Luckily for "Super Mario," the Slovaks decide to play no. 139 ranked Michal Mertinak in the deciding rubber (I still haven’t found out what the heck the Slovaks were thinking here). Ancic gets over his initial nerves by winning the first set in a tiebreaker and simply outplays Mertinak in the next two. It was a bit anticlimactic, but at least the better team won.


So Davis Cup was finished, and we though all the excitement was over for the rest of the year—WRONG!


Jelena Dokic, the Yugoslavian-turned-Australian-turned-Serbian ex-top 10er, decided to turn Australian again. After letting her ranking slip below 500 and finally breaking it off with her nutso dad, she decided it was time for a change, and that she’d be much better off playing for Australia than Serbia and Montenegro. So she packed up her bags, hopped on the next plane heading Down Under, and popped up in Melbourne, demanding wildcards.

Meanwhile, a certain Swiss Miss was brooding in her mansion outside Zurich when she heard about Dokic’s self-pronounced comeback. As the 25-year-old Martina Hingis moped around her extensive acreage in the Alps, reminiscing about her glory days, missing all the attention she used to get, and most of all ruing the day the Williams sisters turned pro, an idea came to her. If Jelena Dokic could revive her career, why couldn’t Hingis herself do it? With all the injuries going around the tour, Hingis’ chances weren’t looking all that bad. So she called her agent, called Melanie (speaking of nutso parents), and started plotting…


All the while, a rumor has been floating around that finalist Mariano Puerta was doping during the French Open. The official results come out and, sure enough, Puerta tested positive. His excuse? He got up in the middle of the night with an uncontrollable thirst. So desperate for something to quench it, he grabbed the first beverage he saw and chugged it down. Unfortunately for him, it was his wife’s hypertension medication. Poor Mariano. Obviously he’s telling the truth, because if he were lying, he would have thought of an excuse that was a little less absurd.

However, Puerta wasn’t the only person accused of doping during the French Open. Sixteen-year-old Sesil Karatancheva, semifinalist this year at Roland Garros, tested positive for an abnormally high amount of the banned substance nandrolone. Her excuse? She was pregnant at the time, and pregnant women contain more of this substance than is normal. So you’d rather tell everyone that you’re a pregnant 16-year-old? Well, whatever. By the way, what happened to the baby, Sesil? Oh, miscarriage? That’s convenient.

What both Puerta and Karatancheva forgot to mention is that Puerta is the father of the baby... kidding.

More on the soap opera that is professional tennis to come later…